Sydney

Philip Guston is the point of inspiration for this spirited group exhibition—specifically, his painting East Tenth, 1977, which this gallery shrewdly acquired in the early 1980s. Typical of his rather solemn, idiosyncratic experiments from this period, the work features a grimy New York sky above cartoon bottles, red-brick walls, and shapes reminiscent of Guston’s earlier Ku Klux Klan–type profiles. While the curatorial premise, detailed on a gallery wall, is fairly pedestrian—that contemporary artists have continued Guston’s obsession with “formless matter” and “living presence”—it becomes inconsequential for the works themselves. This is especially true of Dana Schutz’s Breastfeeding, 2015, Neo Rauch’s Gebot, 2002, and Jamian Juliano-Villani’s Boom Shot, 2015, all of which, although very different, share art-historical DNA, which might be described as a conflation of Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism. Schutz’s work in particular—an almost violent portrayal of breastfeeding—seems as if it could command the entire gallery space, showing a baby’s expressionless face as the stationary focal point amid an unshapen whirlwind of a mother’s slippers, feet, arms, and knees.